September 25, 2007

For those of you who do not follow baseball, the Yankees have a new pitcher Joba Chamberlain who has done a tremendous job as a relief pitcher. When he was introduced in the middle of the year, the coaches explained a series of complicated rules that would be used to "develop" this young star.

The rules were something like:

If he pitches one inning one day, he cannot pitch the next day.

If he pitches two innings one day, he cannot pitch the next 2 days.

He will not start in the middle of an inning.

He will appear only as a relief pitcher.

There were more rules, but you get the point. For the most part, the rules have been obeyed and the fans and the opponents have known what to expect.

Just the other day, the Yankees decided to break rule 3.

Now think ahead to the World Series. The opponents have a set of expectations about this young phenom. Imagine, if in game 7, the Yanks announce that pitcher X will start and on the day, who walks onto the mound but Joba! It would be a tremendous psychological advantage.

This post is about framing one's message. The way that one describes something that someone sees has as much or more value than the thing being observed. Sometimes the explanation will appear to contradict what one sees because the information in a movement or an activity is hidden until someone points it out.

This is the power of Veotag. We add intelligence to media and give the opportunity to frame the message.

September 06, 2007

This is another step forward for the Hugo Chavez government and I can see that Venezuela is going to leave the US in the dust when it comes to progressive social policy. What brilliance!

I expect that this thinking will be echoed and improved upon by other nations. Think of the simplicity if a nation were to suddenly restrict the names to only boy and girl. Then you would never need to know a person's name at all. Of course, for people who were dressed in concealing clothing you might have the possibility of mislabeling them and committing a horrible gaffe.

It does create a problem though if you have only 2 names. What do you do with someone who is cross-gender or hermaphroditic? You might have to expand the scope of language to admit a third possibility.

If you are a fan of Greek philosophy, you may see that this argument leads to the need for quite a few names. The argument would be, if A and B do not describe C then you need to add C to the set. If A,B,C do not describe D, then you need to add D to the set. Hence, the need for a large set of names.

In fact, Philosophy, as a study, spends much of its time on classification. It develops a large set of names and attempts to use the syntatic use of the elements to precisely describe what is going on. An attempt to restrict the name space will lead to only to the use of binary (or n-ary) representations where new things are described entirely by joining together known items. (This is the basic of computer representation where everything is described entirely by 1's and 0's).

What does this have to do with Veotag?

Today, tagging technology is restricted to the use of single keywords or phrases. Most tags today are around the outside of a video, not inside it. The Veotag technology allows people to tag the inside of a video and then a user can do a visual scan of the video to see what is inside. The tags are exported to the major search engines so you can go from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. and jump right into the video to the part that interests you.

The next step up from this syntactic tagging is semantic tagging. Some activities have restricted vocabularies. Sports is one such example. In a baseball game, or a football game, the language that one uses to describe what is happening is restricted. Veotag is releasing a product at the end of the year which takes advantage of this.

When you can talk in a restricted domain about what is going on, like "what percentage of the time on 3rd and goal will my opponent make an end run?" you can learn new things from you media assets. The act of tagging will by itself create a statistical database.

Veotag will provide the ability to define a domain of interest and start to gather restricted information on it first for sports and then for general consumption. We are looking for partners in the knowledge space and domain experts who would like to use this technology to help their customers and/or employees learn more from their video (and audio) assets.